Bit behind on this one, but still… “The company this week introduced an experimental feature on its Google News Web site in the United States to allow any person mentioned in a news report that is linked there to submit a written response.”
“It’s quickly becoming common knowledge that many major labels will not consider a band on MySpace unless they have at least 25′000 profile views!
Don’t miss out on that opportunity simply because of a technicality.Ok, time to level the playing field! We’ll now send unique people to your profile to rank up your views and song plays lightning fast.”
“Well, what do you think? After seeing what an unconference is all about, do you want to go back to a regular conference event?” - Josh Hallett
That (paraphrased) quote came at the end of BlogOrlando, the one day event that took place in Orlando, Florida (duh) for a single day. I’ve been to a number of unconference style events and am continually surprised & impressed at how much fun they turn out to be. More importantly perhaps is the amount of seriously, actionable, usable knowledge I gain over more traditional conferences.
Huge thanks and kudos to Josh for his hard work. He and the volunteers, sponsors, and session leaders were remarkable. (Even if I missed out on my correctly sized shirt. Damn me and my procrastination) I can’t wait for next year!
Here’s a few of my random take-aways after the event.
I want to be an astronaut. Still.
Event organizer, Josh Hallett deserves some serious, serious credit for putting together an amazing event. He certainly had help, but he was an incredible host, tour guide, cruise director, and organizer. Where can I sign up for next year’s event?
One of the best parts of the trip was heading to Kennedy Space Center with 30+ bloggers & social media experts. Many geeky jokes were had, of course, but my life-long dream of becoming an astronaut was brought one step closer. I didn’t get to touch the Shuttle, which was disappointing. Clearly my expectations were set a little high. (Flickr photo gallery)
Singularity of Vision
The speaker line-up at the event was absolutely fantastic. (I wondered at one point how much the collective day rate of all the consultants there might be) When you get industry folks together, many of them have for years been on the same page about the industry, where things are going, and where problems/challenges exist. But interestingly, this event was unique because so many people were using the same words, ideas, and communication methods to share their thinking. This was more than a simple matter of blogging leading to extended use of the same phrases. Social media folks seem to honestly have come together on the key industry issues whether they meant to or not.
The world doesn’t start in the Valley
One of the speakers (Shel Israel?) mentioned something to the effect of “all the cool, new ideas start in Silicon Valley and move outward; by the time most people even hear about them, the Valley crowd has lost interest”.
First off – no, the cool ideas don’t all start in the Valley. Plenty of cool stuff originates elsewhere even if the Valley has a strong concentration. Secondly, some ideas might start in the Valley, but they grow up elsewhere. (See my comments about the unconference concept below)
“You want me to book a trip for what??” Many hardcore unconference advocates will tell you that an event isn’t an unconference unless you plan the event on the morning of the event after everyone has already arrived. BlogOrlando had session topics and leaders set in place in advance. This had two effects:
It brought in out-of-towners in larger numbers than a typical unconference event. Rather than being a collection of locals, people showed up from as far as Canada.
It allowed for many more people than just “industry insiders” to see value and thus register.
I’ve wondered for a while if BarCamp events simply drive strictly local, “echo chamber” insider participation. Having seen the wonderful “structure in advance, solicit large levels of audience participation” model that BlogOrlando had, I’m inclined to say yes.Nikon ruled the day
Everywhere you turned there were Nikon DSLRs. This was especially true during the Space Center trip, where something like 20 of the 30+ people there were packing one. Nikon’s blogger outreach efforts were clearly having an impact.
“How do we get our colleagues/clients to participate”
One recurring theme throughout the day of the event from audience members was asking this question. Since I started doing community/social media work, I’ve heard this question more than any other, but nowhere near as many times in one day as BlogOrlando. Clearly this is one of the pivotal issues for this industry.
Chris Heuer Rocks.
Seriously, I’ve talked industry stuff with Chris quite a bit, especially of late. But his presentation at the end of the day made some absolutely brilliant points and did so in with some really cool visuals. I’m totally stealing some of his ideas.
Ideas are made for stealing
Speaking of stealing ideas, I made a smart ass comment to a fellow attendee who mentioned they liked something in my presentation and wanted to steal it for their own work. I said “That’s fine by me, ideas are made for stealing”. Probably the most insightful thing I’ve said all year… clearly Mom was wrong about smart ass comments never having any value.
Fun Video Geoff posted a cool video of the Space Center visit. Have a watch!
Fantastic read about the realities of banning (and using) Facebook at work. Best quote: “Banning Facebook is the equivalent of banning coffee shops and water coolers and loos.”
Bit behind on this one, but still… “The company this week introduced an experimental feature on its Google News Web site in the United States to allow any person mentioned in a news report that is linked there to submit a written response.”
Our records indicate that you have not accessed fedex.com with this user ID in more than 14 months: sink21*. If you did log into fedex.com recently, you used a different user ID.
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Thank you.
This type of thing is a first for me. I wonder what the motivation here is – perhaps this is a marketing effort to get me to come back to the site. Or perhaps they’re doing some technology/database cleanup for some reason. Seems odd, and a bit of a waste of time. Plus, I don’t like that I don’t have my username for the long-term. I like my username.
Let’s get that out of the way right up front. RSS can allow for some really cool opportunities and functionalities. My profile mashup on Profilactic, for instance, is a great way to collect content from my various personal content RSS feeds into one place. I have literally hundreds of RSS feeds in my feed reader, including some to message boards and indivdual blog posts/forum topics. Love it.
In recent memory, I’ve signed up for several services that have asked me for RSS feeds to my content so that they can better showcase who I am (Plaxo Pulse), or better aggregate and distribute my blog content to receptive audiences (Social Media Today).
While both of these goals may be met when I give them my RSS URL, something else more problematic happens: The context of the content is reworked into something I don’t own. Both Plaxo and SMT allow users to leave comments, rate, get view counts, and permalink the content outside of the context and confines of my own blog. Take a look at my content on either of these sites and you’ll have a hard time understanding where I originally posted said content. You’ll also have a hard time understanding that I’d prefer that comments are left on my blog, not on these aggregator sites.
To be clear, I’m not saying Plaxo or SMT have done anything wrong. I willingly gave them quasi-license to rework my content. The real question is, however, why did I do that?
If you’re following the presidential horse race, you may have read about the concern some pundits have about the fact that the top-tier (so to speak) Republican candidates have been blowing off certain types of debates, namely black and latino focused ones. The response from the various camps is that there were scheduling issues.
“We consider every debate invitation equally as they relate to the schedule,” said Kevin Madden, a Romney spokesman. “Unfortunately, our schedule considerations for the month of September were such that we had to decline several debate invitations and candidate forums from different groups around the country, including Wharton Business School and CNN.”
Fine, maybe there were scheduling issues. But let’s be real: public events are not created equal so don’t tell me that you consider each invitation equally. You don’t.
Whether political events or enthusiast community events, some pack a bigger punch than others. The goal is not attempted equality, it’s to determine which event(s) benefit both parties the best. The goal is to ensure that, as much as possible, Everybody Goes Home Happy. Community members understand that some events carry larger relative weight. Let’s be honest and simply say “Unfortunately with as many events as we’re traveling to this year, we had to choose which events will have the biggest impact on both parties.” Make decisions together with your community leaders about what events are worthwhile to attend/support/fund, and things will be just fine.
But while the GOP campaigns have generally offered no public rationale other than timing for missing the forums, an adviser to one suggested they had little to gain from attending an event such as Smiley’s.
“What’s the win?” said the adviser, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “Why would [the candidates] go into a crowd where they’re probably going to be booed?”
Now, here’s the kicker – happiness isn’t instant. Getting to a place where everybody can indeed go home happy takes work. Showing up on the first date expecting to hit a home run before midnight isn’t the beginning of a relationship, it’s a one-night stand. Why would candidates (or marketers) go into a situation where they might be booed? Because it shows honesty. It shows that the company, by way of the individual on stage, finds it more important to interact with the customer than to be insulated from negativity.
At LEGO it took me a year (or more) of regular interaction, listening to complaints, and delivery of solutions with our adult hobbyist community before they stopped thinking of me as a marketing hack. I had an insanely uphill battle when I started due to decades of the company ignoring the community all together. Had I thrown in the towel at the first sign of “boos”, we never would have brought the Everybody Goes Home Happy mantra to life like we did. To this day, adult LEGO fans still tell me how my perseverance in the face of difficult interactions showed them how serious LEGO was about them and their needs.
So this random adviser asks “Why would [the candidates] go into a crowd where they’re probably going to be booed?” Because it’s tough, and they’ll respect you for it. Until you have someone’s respect, you won’t be capable of changing their mind.
“Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle”… then they’ll take forever and only marginally implement with some other Google services.
My friend and evangelism guru, Guy Kawasaki is running a webinar about…well…evangelism. Duh. If you’ve never seen/heard Guy speak, now’s your chance. (Although, if you’ve never seen him speak, make it a priority to do so)
Please join me for a free online WebEx seminar called “The Art of Evangelism.” During this seminar I’ll explain the strategies and tactics of evangelism for products and services. I hope you can join me.
Tuesday, September 25th
11:00 am Pacific
Register here
Speaking of Webinars, if I were to offer communityguy.com webinars, would you be interested? Topics may include:
Hiring & Training Community Managers
Pitching Community Concepts to Upper Management
Day-to-day management of Co-Creation Projects
Technologies for managing community>company conversation
Planning and Developing Customer/Community Engagement Strategy
Best Practices for Community Driven Event Participation
If you’d be interested in Webinars of this nature, please leave a comment on this thread or drop me an email.
I love my Mac and I love iCal. I don’t like that there isn’t a way to set a default preference for an alarm to be automatically attached to a new meeting. This iCal plug fixes all that.
Jake McKee is the Chief Strategy Officer and Ant Wrangler at Ant's Eye View, a customer experience strategy practice focused on helping clients escalate their customer experience. With a rich background in customer collaboration, online communities, and fan groups, and Web development, community management, and product development, Jake helps organizations understand how to act like groups of people, rather than soulless money making machines.
In a past life, Jake was the Global Community
Relations Specialist for the LEGO Company, where he spent five years on the
front lines of customer-company interaction.
